Like the English cities that are home to the flashy new grounds and the Club Superstores, the game itself has been gentrified out of all recognition. Riotous behaviour hasn’t been seen inside an Premiership stadium in years – and the odd skirmish you see on the streets around the old tinderbox classics are almost ironic excursions – campaign re-enactments by Granddads in £500 Stone Island jackets and 50 grand Beemers.
It’s because the market towns, industrial valleys and city estates that these kids hailed from have been denuded of their working class history. The culture that spawned the loveable rogue that was the English football hoolie is no more.
You see, of all the youth-oriented cults to ever find roots in the fertile earth of seventies England, the football hooligan was amongst the most misunderstood, even in the land that gave it birth. When English clubs began making it into Europe in the ‘old football’ halcyon of the late seventies and early eighties, those legendary away days were as much about representing your immediate neighbourhood, your identity as a working class male, as any kind of in-built hatred for the European other.
It was never about nation. It was never about race. It was about class and identity, standing your ground while dressing devilishly in the process. The context here was the brutal war on the working class of Britain. Back home the factories were closing. The foundries were being demolished. The pits were being flooded. In these communities where football thrived there was a well-thought-out demonisation of the working class male.
Communities of working class kids gathered together at the football, turned against themselves, spent all their wages on clothes and train tickets, as they ventured far and wide on a Saturday. ”You think we’re rubbish? Then I’m going to dress like a million dollars while confirming your prejudices for a laugh."
www.huckmag.com
en.m.wikipedia.org
www.independent.co.uk
